Biography

The Hungerfords had acquired Stock by 1431, and further purchases of estates ensured that the family became one of the more substantial in the area bordering north Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.20 Although Hungerford was only the second son, his father was able to leave him three manors, a part lease of Down Ampney parsonage, and £150.21 Hungerford further bolstered his financial independence by making two lucrative marriages. The first, to the widow of a prominent local gentleman, brought him additional properties in Wiltshire and Berkshire. After a legal battle with his Catholic mother-in-law, who was living as an exile in Louvain, Hungerford also received generous legacies from his wife’s father, a distant kinsman.22 Following Hungerford’s second marriage to a lady already ‘sufficiently advanced with much money’, he acquired Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, but continued to live in Wiltshire until at least 1617.23

Hungerford’s father had once been a militia captain charged with searching for recusants, but he nevertheless married into a Catholic family.24 Although Hungerford was compelled to attend the parish church, his mother, a convicted recusant, ensured that he was ‘accustomed to the rites and practice of that religion [Catholicism], which being full of ceremonies pleasing to the eye, and masked with the works of seeming charity and devotion, did first win my liking to the outside sense, before my years had afforded me the least use of reason’.25 He was admitted to the Catholic church in 1584, but reconverted to Protestantism four years later, for reasons he elucidated in two restrained autobiographical works, one of which was published posthumously.26

The Hungerford family had often previously represented Great Bedwyn in Parliament, and shared the patronage of the borough with the Seymour earls of Hertford, who owned the manor. Having sat as the borough’s senior Member in the last two Elizabethan parliaments, Hungerford was returned again in 1604; however, he was obliged to take the second seat, giving precedence to the 1st earl of Hertford’s nominee, Sir John Rodney. Hungerford’s contribution to debates is obscured by the fact that the Commons Journal does not usually differentiate between him and his kinsman, John Hungerford*, who sat for Chippenham. He may have been nominated to committees for bills to prohibit the residence of married men in colleges (14 June 1604), confirm letters patent (5 July), suppress the use of logwood and endow poor churches (15 May 1607), as well as measures concerned with Damerham (4 July 1610) and contractors (5 July).27 After the dissolution he was appointed a Wiltshire deputy lieutenant, despite having recently protested to Hertford, with other local magistrates, against the excessive fees demanded by the muster-master.28 He did not stand for Parliament again, and in 1624 retired from the deputy lieutenancy in favour of his son and heir, Edward*.29

Hungerford spent the last decade of his life at Black Bourton, while his brother, Sir John, helped manage his estates.30 By this time his property included six messuages in London and two manors in Kent, acquired from his second father-in-law.31 Some of his purchases involved him in acrimonious legal suits. In 1612 he was named in a case involving the sale of the copyhold of South Marston manor, Wiltshire, in which he had allegedly intimidated the original owner, ‘a simple woman, and fearful of his threatening speeches’. Two years later he secured £400 on property in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, in trust for the wife of his relative, Edmund. On Edmund’s death, Hungerford refused to release the money while continuing to enjoy the profits of the property. By 1621 his recalcitrance had resulted in a summons by the Privy Council to explain his actions.32

Hungerford died at Black Bourton on 27 June 1627, four days after making his will. He was sufficiently prosperous to provide for his sons’ education, three of whom were still minors, while setting aside 4,000 marks for two of his daughters’ marriage portions. Bequests were made to the poor of several parishes, including £10 to support two apprentices in Great Bedwyn and £5 to ‘the ploughboy whom I brought out of Wiltshire with me’. The advowson of Corsham church was given to his children’s schoolmaster. He instructed the latter to raise his children according to the tenets of the Church of England, ‘which I constantly believe to be the same that Christ and his apostles planted in the Primitive Church’.33 Four of Hungerford’s sons, two of them barristers, entered Parliament, principally representing Wiltshire constituencies. His eldest, Sir Edward, became a noted parliamentarian soldier, while Anthony, who succeeded to Sir Edward’s estate, was disabled in 1644 as a royalist.34 Bridget, Hungerford’s only daughter from his first marriage, married Alexander Chocke II*; while his youngest married Alexander Thistlethwaite, from one of the most prominent landed families in Wiltshire.35